If you look at a piece of old English writing, you will find it hard to make any sense of it. The truth is that there is nothing wrong with your comprehension skills but a complicated history that made old English writings impossible for us modern speakers to understand.
If you pick a piece of old English writing and compare it against a modern text, perhaps the only few similar words you will find are he, his, and such. Old and modern English are poles apart if there is only a glaringly evident fact.
Let’s take a quick look at the history of Old English Writing below.
English
Being a Germanic language by root, English has a few close relatives, including Frisian, Dutch, and German. And the fun fact doesn’t end there: The Germanic clan wasn’t the only one standard way more than a millennium.
There was also the wider, Indo-European clan with branches including Celtic, Italic, and Slavic included. If you know a little background history about English’s birthplace England, you’d know that the first languages to get here were the Celtic ones.
Hence, before you would have heard people in the British Isles communicating in English, you would have heard more Welsh and Irish. But Britain’s Celtic speakers slowly began displacing through invasions and immigrations, taking away some Celtic languages.
The invaders who settled in Britain from the Southeast primarily spoke Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, and Cornish.
Old English Runes
We now use the Latin alphabet to communicate in the English language. But some of the ancient English writings were vastly different. This is because they were written in Angle-Son runes, and their alphabets were sometimes referred to as futhorc.
Around the 5th century A.D., the first runic inscriptions surfaced in Britain. By the time the 11th Century rolled by, you could see the futhorc sharing a distinct similarity with the Tolkien novels it had made way for.
As the English language continued to evolve since then, most of the runes surrendered to disuse. What remained were only a few runes that combined the new English writing structures that took place. It was finally, in the year 1066, William of Normandy overtook the throne of England, that the English language changed forever.
Normans being in charge of England, introduced their French dialect everywhere. But the plebians continued their interactions in English until the two languages finally emerged. The Normans introduced a good amount of new vocabulary and distinctly changed spellings and pronunciations.
Final Thoughts
The English language has come a long way. Separated by a millennium at least, it is nearly impossible for modern English speakers and writers to decipher pieces of Old English writing even today.
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